
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, June 8, 1990                   TAG: 9006080733
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

BOUCHER'S WAY

FOR MORE than a year now, you've been hearing about something called a Clean Air Act, an update of the 1970 law. Don't hold your breath. It's coming, but at the measured pace that Congress is pleased to call deliberative. The summer haze will be thick with oxidants, ozone and particulates before the House and Senate conference committee produces a version to submit to both houses.

By late August, there will have been much lobbying, horse-trading and compromising. Should the final bill include the House's mandate that Detroit produce a fleet of clean-burning vehicles? Or the Senate's prescription for a gasoline mix for nine heavily polluted metropolitan areas? Which chamber's deadline should be adopted for utilities to shift to less-polluting fuel? What about coke production, which the Senate would regulate and the House ignores?

Involved here is an elaborate balancing act: finding ways to make the nation's air cleaner, more breathable and more healthful without making the economy less healthy. There will be winners and losers. Certain polluting industries, such as steel, utilities and automobiles, will pay a price, and some of that will affect their employees. When an area is already depressed, as America's coalfields have been in recent years, there's strong resistance to environmental legislation.

In earlier maneuvering over clean air, Rep. Rick Boucher of Virginia's 9th District found a middle way that will benefit him politically and - depending on what ends up in the conference version of the bill - should benefit his district as well.

Boucher is on the Energy and Commerce Committee, a panel influential in drawing up the House measure on clean air. He has been less than enthusiastic about efforts to tighten restrictions on emissions that contribute to acid rain; those are traced to coal, and in the 9th, that's usually enough said.

It happens, however, that the 9th is blessed with deposits of low-sulfur coal, which pollutes less when burned than does the high-sulfur kind. Boucher backed a provision in the House to encourage greater use of low-sulfur coal. If adopted as one of the cleanup tools in the new clean-air bill, Boucher says it could create hundreds of new jobs in his district. It's certainly a better approach to the problem than that proposed, unsuccessfully, by Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va.: spending half a billion dollars to pay and retrain coal miners that the bill throws out of work.

Not all the compromises that will be made in the next couple of months can produce the best of both worlds: cleaner air and visible economic benefits. There's no reason, however, there can't be more of both. Abating pollution is an economic activity too, creating jobs while it makes the world more livable. Both regulators and regulated need to rise to new challenges rather than continuing to fight the old battles.

by CNB